Like many Nepali children, I grew up watching Bollywood flicks. As a child, I used to come home from school and flick through the channels and there would always be some film or the other would running on TV. And all the films had the same old premise: A morally good guy (the hero), the pretty subdued heroine, the over-the-top villain and, sometimes, a comic sidekick. At the time, I never found anything wrong with it. Almost all films were made this way (and even continue to be made to this day) and so there was never a way to compare and decide whether or not this was an accurate representation of life. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to notice how films have gone on to shape our ideas of masculinity and femininity.

“Ad Astra” looks and sounds like a space epic with a movie star lead in Brad Pitt, but there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface.